As I was writing my new novel The Nowhere – an Australian coming-of-age novel with LGBT+ themes – it dawned on me that it could be a tricky book to market. This is because even when I came up with the original concept and sketched out my plan, I knew I wanted to create a juxtaposition between the protagonist’s story being told as both a teenager and an adult.

As predicted, this resulted in a story that combines teenage leads experiencing things for the first time with adults who have almost experienced everything. In some parts it feels like a book that would appeal to a young adult audience, while other themes pull it back into the adult fiction market.

The result of which led me to do some research into an emerging genre dubbed new adult (NA) fiction, which tends to feature protagonists in the 18 to 30 bracket. I started to wonder whether The Nowhere would sit better in this new category, and decided to explore the developing genre further.